Critical Issues for Working Families


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Don't Vote, Don't Vent

Critical Issues for Working Families

Who Will Lead the Next Congress?

The Tightest Senate Races

Too Close to Call House Races

Power Shifting in 36 States

Women on the Edge of a Breakthrough

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During the first half of 2002, the stock market plunge wiped out $3.7 trillion of wealth, including the retirement savings of millions of citizens.

Most Americans believe the U.S. “is headed in the wrong direction,” recent surveys show. It’s not hard to see why. On issue after issue, government policy has been hijacked by the super-rich, who are helping themselves while doing grave damage to our country.

A Failing Economy
The economic policies of the GOP-dominated Congress and Bush administration are an unmitigated disaster. In January 2001, there were 18.2 million manufacturing jobs in the U.S. There are only 16.7 million such jobs today — an average loss of 83,000 manufacturing jobs a month, federal figures show.

Long-term unemployment is the worst it’s been in a decade. Nearly 2 million U.S. workers have been unemployed more than 26 weeks and, by October 1, some 1.5 million people had exhausted their unemployment benefits. Many state unemployment trust funds are teetering on the brink of bankruptcy.

Wage growth has slowed to its lowest levels in eight years, and food banks across the country are struggling to meet a rising flood of requests for assistance.

$3.7 trillion in wealth went up in smoke between January and July, as investors fled the market, frightened by a crime wave of accounting fraud and insider trading involving companies like Enron, Halliburton, Worldcom/MCI, Johnson & Johnson, Citigroup, J.P. Morgan Chase, Tyco, AOL, Global Crossing, Xerox, Qwest and Adelphia.

Meanwhile, the U.S. trade deficit has ballooned to more than $400 billion and is expanding an alarming 16 percent a year. The deficit hit a record-high $37.6 billion in May, decimating American jobs as imports outstripped exports and driving up foreign debt to the tune of $1 billion a day.

A Surge In Deficits
Corporate America’s allies have also made a mess of government finances in remarkably short order. “Virtually the entire $5.6 trillion, 10-year surplus projected when Bush came to office has disappeared,” reports political analyst David Broder, noting that nearly half the surplus was blown on tax cuts for the richest one percent of the U.S. population. Current projections for 2003, alone, show a $194 billion deficit, $85 billion (or 44 percent) more than the administration predicted.

Rather than face the problem, Congressional conservatives and administration officials are cooking the books with a recklessness that would make an Enron executive blush. They insist they will balance the budget by 2005, while every major government study projects deficits for the next 10 years. Their promised return to fiscal sanity assumes a sharp rise in corporate profits and ignores (among other things) some $400 billion revenue lost to tax cuts, $160 billion spending for the new Medicare prescription drug plan, and billions more blown on expiring tax cuts that Corporate America wants to make permanent.

Congressional conservatives shrugged off repeated warnings about the risks of massive tax cuts in an uncertain economic climate. Even now they refuse to listen, while a stalled economy is wrecking havoc with government finances.

Risking Our Retirement
In a recent survey, 44 percent of the people said they will be forced to retire later in life than they had planned. Why? Because crashing stock prices and the wave of corporate scandals have decimated their retirement savings.

Yet even in the wake of the Enron debacle, Corporate America’s allies insisted on phony pension protection “reforms” that do not require companies to provide workers with better information on the true state of corporate finances or to offer employees a greater mix of company and non-company stock.

Nor did Congress even consider requiring companies to offer “defined benefit” plans (which provide a guaranteed benefit) instead of stock-based 401(k)’s (which shift the risks to employees and pump billions into the corporate treasuries). Only 30 years ago, 71 percent of all employees with pensions were covered by defined benefit plans. Today, the figure is only 29 percent.

On the other hand, Congress will spend an estimated $2 trillion of the Social Security surplus during the next decade to cover budget shortfalls caused by the recent tax-cutting binge.

Mugging older folk is ugly business. It’s time to elect people who will stand up and say “No!”


Maiming America’s Workers
Since January 2001, Corporate America has unleashed an unprecedented assault on the rights of U.S. workers. Congressional conservatives repealed OSHA’s ergonomics standard – regulations proposed by the first Bush administration to remedy the nation’s leading cause of on-the-job injuries, affecting between 600,000 and 1 million people a year. Their allies blocked repeated efforts to raise the minimum wage (now worth only 30 percent of its 1968 value) by a mere $1.50 over three years.

Corporate America cheered as the Bush administration unilaterally dismantled the National Partnership Councils, created under President Nixon to promote voluntary cooperation between federal employee unions and the government. Rules punishing contractors who violate federal labor, environmental or consumer protection laws? Repealed. Laws requiring corporations to report consultants and attorneys hired to bust unions? Repealed.

The Labor Department’s Women’s Bureau was scrapped: a bureau that has focused on issues vital to working women for 82 years, through 11 Democratic and 13 Republican administrations.

Yet we have new federal rules that require employers to notify workers of their right to refuse to join unions and to withhold a portion of their dues, with no requirement that they also advise employees of their legal rights to organize or join unions. Corporate America’s allies are also pushing hard for federal laws to cripple the ability of unions to engage in political activities.

Unless union members respond with a massive voter turnout this fall, history may record these attacks as Corporate America’s mere warmup for the main event.